The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Today, hundreds of fan sites are devoted to Natalie Dormer, who managed, despite being cast on the basis of “sexual chemistry,” to create an Anne Boleyn who is seen by thousands of young women as genuinely multidimensional. Natalie still gets letters from them every day and finds them gratifying, but also a bit depressing. “The fact that it was so unusual for them to have an inspiring portrait of a spirited, strong young woman—that’s devastating to me. But young women picked up on my efforts, and that is a massive compliment—and says a lot about the intelligence of that audience. Young girls struggling to find their identity, their place, in this supposedly postfeminist era understood what I was doing.”71

  12

  Chapuys’ Revenge

  Fiction Becomes Fact Once Again

  IN 2002 ROBIN MAXWELL, who had written a highly praised novel about Anne, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, was given a new manuscript to read. Arcade editor Trish Todd wanted to know, would Robin give it a blurb?

  The manuscript took Maxwell by surprise. Most novels about Anne that were written in the 1980s and ’90s had been quite sympathetic toward her. Maxwell’s own book (1997) is constructed around the delightful fiction that Elizabeth discovers Anne’s diary and learns how much her mother loved her and how “cruel and outrageously unjust” her father had been; the knowledge redeems Anne in her daughter’s eyes and sets Elizabeth up for a lifetime of caution about giving the men in her life too much power.1 In Jean Plaidy’s beautifully wrought The Lady in the Tower (1986), we find Anne imprisoned, thinking back on her life, wondering “how had I come to pass from such adulation to bitter rejection in three short years”; her reflections are those of a mature, regretful, clear-sighted woman, capable of recognizing her own faults, but very much aware of how her own missteps had been cruelly exploited by others.2 This new book, however, seemed to Maxwell to be a modern re-creation of the old Catholic view of Anne as a scheming viper.

  “I was appalled,” Robin recalled in a phone interview with me. “It was a great read, a page-turner. But she had taken every rumor, every nasty thing that anyone had ever said about Anne Boleyn, and turned it into the truth in her book. You can argue that she had every right because she’s a historical fiction author, but I refused the blurb on principle because of its vicious, unsupportable view of Anne.”3

  The book was Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. In it, the character of Anne is indeed more selfish, spiteful, and vindictive than she had appeared in any previous novel, a nasty, screechy shrew who poaches Henry from her generous, tenderhearted (and very blonde) sister and proceeds to tyrannize her (and everyone around her), barking out orders, plotting deaths, appropriating her sister’s child, and—when she miscarries her final pregnancy with Henry—coercing her brother to have sex with her. Neither Sleeping Beauty nor Cinderella strikes a more clear-cut division between the good and the wicked woman, with Anne playing the role of the wicked witch and Mary the long-suffering, virtuous heroine. As in any other fairy tale, however, the good are ultimately rewarded and the evil are punished. Anne, having gone to “the gates of hell” with her brother in order to get pregnant, miscarries a deformed child (an idea that Gregory picked up from Retha Warnicke’s 1989 biography), is accused of witchcraft, and goes to the scaffold (in far less dignified fashion than history records) while Mary, with Elizabeth in her arms, retires to a bucolic life with her husband and children.4

  Gregory describes herself as a “feminist historian, and a radical historian” and Mary Boleyn as a feminist heroine—apparently because she has sex and yet isn’t portrayed as “bad.”5 (I thought we went past that—and then some—with Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ally McBeal, and Sex and the City.) “It is no coincidence,” Gregory says, “that our prejudiced opinions of women of the Tudor court are drawn from the devoted Victorian historians who were the first translators and publishers of the original Tudor documents, but were deeply committed to their own view of women as either saints or whores.”6 Her novel, in contrast, allows Mary to be both sexual and saintlike, and despite having been “used” sexually by Henry, she is rewarded with the best ending of anyone in the book (which just happens to be a life of domestic happiness). “Mary’s story is one of absolute independence and victory,” Gregory says, and a “triumph of common sense over the ambition of her sister Anne.”7 Huh? Sex is allowed, but ambition isn’t? What kind of feminism is this? The answer to that appears to be: an opportunistic, infinitely malleable one. Gregory, in a more recent interview, complains about how “one-eyed some historians have been” in their depictions of women of power: “They are always portrayed as power hungry, pretty ambitious, manipulative, cold or proud.”8 This sounds like a pretty fair description of her portrayal of Anne Boleyn.

  The book was well reviewed and has been fabulously successful with general readers. It stormed the U.S. market, selling more than a million copies in the U.S. alone, and it has by now been published in twenty-six countries. It won the Parker Pen Novel of the Year award, the Romantic Times fictional biography award, was adapted for the BBC as a television drama, and was made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, and Eric Bana as Henry VIII. It has legions of devoted fans, who write gushing tributes on Gregory’s website. But other novelists and historians, both professional and amateur, range from the politely critical to the seething when The Other Boleyn Girl is mentioned. Most are offended less by the “viciousness” of its view of Anne than by its many historical inaccuracies. Hilary Mantel notes that the notion that Anne gave birth to a deformed child is an “eccentric interpretation” that has “gained traction” because of its sensational elements.9 Robin Maxwell criticizes Gregory for “knowing the truth” as a scholar but then going with what is “most dramatic” for her readers, even when there is “zero evidence.”10 Michael Hirst, who knows what it’s like to be charged with distorting history, describes Philippa Gregory as “having no historical sensibility at all. Her characters are all middle-class people wandering into a historical situation and behaving in a very modern middle-class way . . . Her Anne is like someone in the dorm of your university.”11 One Facebook group, which calls itself the History Police, will not even call Philippa Gregory by name, instead referring to her sarcastically as “our favorite historical novelist” and engaging in fantasy conversations involving sending snipers to her public talks.

  There’s no doubt that Gregory plays fast and loose with history in The Other Boleyn Girl (see the sidebar “The Other Boleyn Girl Fact-Checker,” on page 224, for specifics) and even more so when the book was made into a movie. The screenplay, written by Philippa Gregory and Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon), contributed fresh inventions to the story. Michael Grandage, who directed the Donmar Warehouse production of Frost/Nixon, credits Morgan with the ability to weave a fictional storyline “so deeply” into a factual situation “that audiences don’t know where the boundaries of truth lie.”12 In the case of The Other Boleyn Girl, the “interwoven” fantasies/fictions included a gratuitous (and utterly out-of-character) rape of Anne by Henry, Mary begging Henry for a last-minute pardon for Anne, and a heroic capture of Elizabeth by Mary, who strides into court after Anne’s execution, grabs her niece, and—with the whole court watching and not lifting a finger—leaves the palace with the future queen in her arms. Oh, and another trifle—the movie “manages to virtually edit out a rather large historical fact: the Reformation.”13 As Gina Carbone puts it in her review, “Let’s just say you shouldn’t watch this and base any Jeopardy! answers around it.”14

  The actors, apparently, did little research beyond reading the novel (Gregory commends Scarlett Johansson for having “her copy of my book in her hand practically all the time she was on set”15), learning how deeply to curtsy from an etiquette coach (“It was those kinds of things,” says Johansson, “that added to the freshness and authenticity of the period”16), and mastering the English accent. Natalie Portman admits to not “relating” to the c
haracter of Anne Boleyn, but appears to be so postmodern in her approach to history (perhaps due to her Harvard degree) that it didn’t matter much: “You have to accept that all history is fiction . . . there are all these different versions.”17 Eric Bana didn’t even bother with checking out the history books. “Look,” he told director Justin Chadwick when he was offered the part, “I never envisaged myself playing a king, or Henry VIII, or anybody” but “Henry, the guy, the man in this script, I said, I think I can get to the core of him and I wanna play him just as a man. That’s all I know. So I just used that. I didn’t get too bogged down in history or any of that stuff, because I felt like at the core of it, it was kind of irrelevant.”18

  Not getting “bogged down” in history matters to some and not to others. “No matter what criticisms The Tudors may have received for its inaccuracies,” one blogger wrote, “the Showtime series seems like a History Channel documentary compared to this movie.”19 Respected historical novelist Margaret George, in an e-mail exchange with me about the actors’ comments, was less circumspect.

  I think they are all a bunch of ignoramuses. Lazy. Un-intellectually curious. As for hiding behind such a dumb and dismissive statement as “all you got from historians was competing views, anyway,” I wonder if they carry that philosophy over into their medical treatments? (“What the heck, they can’t decide how many cigarettes it takes to cause lung cancer, so I’ll just ignore it all!”) Frankly, they all gave dismal performances in TOBG because they were all miscast, except for Scarlett, who acted somnolent through the whole thing even though from a distance she kind of looked like Mary Boleyn. And sorry, Natalie is just not convincing as someone who could topple a throne. Maybe if they’d studied their history a little, they could have done a better job.

  But others didn’t care whether or not, for example, Anne actually propositioned her brother. “It makes for a juicy and shocking footnote,” shrugged Rex Reed, tellingly conflating the apparatus of scholarship with an “event” that has been pretty thoroughly shown by scholars to be Cromwell’s invention.20 And now that it has become culturally referenced by the film, a whole new generation, with little background in history but with an extensive media education, has become vulnerable, once again, to the argument. WELL DONE AND BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED, proclaims the headline of one review, SATISFACTORILY EXPLAINS THE INCEST CHARGE AGAINST ANNE BOLEYN.21 Another online reviewer admits that “near the finale, the dim recollection of my studies and the few facts that I’ve gleaned from other films combined their meager forces as one of Henry’s daughters is named, and my inner monologue actually mixed Hollywood and history and noted ‘I think that baby girl grows up to be Cate Blanchett.’”22 This is what theatre critic Mark Lawson has called the “Oliver Stone phenomenon,” referring to the sizeable number of Americans who believe Oliver Stone’s film JFK to be an accurate portrayal of an actual conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

  * * *

  The Other Boleyn Girl Fact-Checker

  Concocted Fictions:

  Anne deliberately “steals” Henry from Mary (Henry’s affair with Mary was over before he began to pursue Anne).

  Anne forces Mary to give up her son to be raised at court.

  Anne says she wants Wolsey dead.

  Anne behaves viciously to her sister on many occasions.

  Anne induces a miscarriage (third pregnancy) when she thinks the fetus is dead.

  Anne has sex with her brother in order to conceive a child.

  No Evidence or Contrary Evidence:

  Intense rivalry between Anne and Mary (no evidence).

  Mary Boleyn has two children by Henry, one of whom is a son. (Elizabeth Blount, Henry’s former mistress, had Henry’s son. Whether or not Mary had any children by Henry is not known.)

  Anne has sex with Henry Percy (no evidence).

  George Boleyn has an affair with Francis Weston. (This comes from Retha Warnicke’s theory of a “homosexual ring” at Henry’s court. It’s possible, of course, but there’s no evidence.)

  Mary was a virgin before her first marriage. (There are many reports of sexual activity in Francis’s court.)

  Anne’s mother hides evidence of Anne’s miscarriage (second pregnancy) by burning the miscarried fetus. (It’s possible that Anne hid a miscarriage, but it’s speculation. There’s no evidence at all that her mother burned a fetus.)

  Anne gives birth to a “horridly malformed” baby. (This is Retha Warnicke’s theory, but there is no evidence for it. In contemporary accounts, the fetus is referred to only as “a shapeless mass.”)

  Added in the Hollywood movie (screenplay by Peter Morgan):

  Henry was attracted to Anne first, but got turned off when she humiliated him horseback riding. (In fact, Henry had an affair with Mary before he became interested in Anne.)

  In disgrace, Anne was exiled to France after marrying Henry Percy. (Anne did not marry Percy, and she was sent to Austria and then France when she was twelve, to be educated and “finished.”)

  After Mary has just given birth to Henry’s son, Anne (worried that this will foil her own designs on Henry) orders Henry never to talk to Mary again if he wants to have Anne. Henry agrees and walks out of the room, indifferent to his infant son.

  Henry becomes hostile and indifferent to Anne sexually even before the marriage. (Henry pursued Anne for six years before they married—a prolonged courtship missing from the movie—and there is no evidence that he became hostile to her until very late in the marriage.)

  Henry VIII rapes Anne Boleyn.

  Mary intercedes on Anne’s behalf and tries to get Henry to pardon her sister.

  Mary Boleyn walks into court after Anne’s execution and takes Elizabeth with her.

  * * *

  Of course, if my book has demonstrated anything at all, it’s that neither The Tudors nor The Other Boleyn Girl has a monopoly on the creative uses of a history that, after all, has some very large holes in the rec- ord. Nell Gavin, whose ingenious and moving Threads follows Anne through several reincarnations, is based on a metaphysical premise that many readers find dubious; Anne of the Thousand Days cooks up a fictional exchange between Henry and Anne that not only did not happen but is also almost unimaginable; Norah Lofts’s The Concubine has Anne engaging not just in one but multiple anonymous acts of adultery, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons conveniently omits Thomas More’s heretic burnings from among his other hobbies; and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has Cromwell suspicious of Anne from the very beginning of their relationship, whereas, in fact, they were far from enemies for much of her reign. These depictions are not just accepted without protest, they are prizewinning, beloved, and admired. So why the special outrage over Gregory?

  What seems most offensive to historians are not Gregory’s distortions of fact, but her self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah. “Because I am a trained historian,” she wrote in 2008 (in fact, her degree is in eighteenth-century literature),

  I described the story of the Boleyn girls in the full context of the dramatic political, religious and social changes of the time. Without realizing it, in so doing I invented a new way of writing the historical novel in which the “history” part of the equation is just as important as the “novel” part. The fact plays as great a part in the story as the fiction, and when there is a choice of fact or fiction, I always choose the factual version.23

  She describes herself as applying “very strict rules of accuracy” to her novels.”24 What does she supply as a novelist? Only “the bits that we don’t know” and “feelings . . . because we don’t know how people felt.”25

  Fine, for a novelist, and there’s certainly plenty of “bits we don’t know” when it comes to the story of Anne Boleyn. But Gregory doesn’t like to view herself as imaginatively inventive. She wants to defend her narrative choices as history too. In one interview, Gregory described the “made up bits” as speculation about what was “fairly likely.” In a Q-and-A appendix to The Other Boleyn Girl, however, she went further, claiming that
all her choices “can be defended as historical probability” and then she goes still further, with bold statements such as Anne Boleyn “was clearly guilty of one murder”26 (and probably another, she implies) and—in another interview—“Anne’s incest is powerfully suggested by the historical record.”27 (“The historical record” here seems to be that she was found guilty by Henry’s rigged court.) In the production notes for the television version of The Other Boleyn Girl, she backs off a bit, admitting that having Anne proposition her brother is “speculative history.”28 But then, perhaps feeling the need to justify her “choice” further, she goes on: “You could argue that would have been quite a sensible thing to do if she could get away with it.”29 As for the alleged “murder”—the attempted poisoning of John Fisher—it is simply defended as “fact,” although there’s no evidence that Anne had anything to do with it.

  It’s Gregory’s insistence on her meticulous adherence to history that most aggravates the scholars.30 Both Margaret George and Hilary Mantel, in contrast to Gregory, make the fictional status of their novels clear. George includes a guide to what is factual and what is invented in her books. “Readers seem to really want that—they need to know whether this or that scene really happened, or where certain information came from. I think more and more writers are asking that it be included.”31 Mantel, in an e-mail exchange with me, described Wolf Hall not as “history” but as “part of a chain of literary representation.”32 In an author’s note to Bring Up the Bodies, her sequel to Wolf Hall, Mantel describes that book as “making the reader a proposal, an offer” of “how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.”33 She warns the reader against taking her as “claiming authority.” Gregory’s website, in contrast, intones the mantra that the hallmarks of her writing are “her love for history and commitment to historical accuracy.”34 “I’m passionate about getting things right,” she says in a 2008 interview.35 (The example she gives: a “long investigation of precisely when riding sidesaddle first became known in England.”36) On closer inspection, however, it seems as though her research isn’t all that extensive. She (rightly) derides those who rely on Wikipedia and considers herself someone who has “all the complexity of having read twenty different sources.” But twenty sources, for someone writing history, would barely make a dent in the “complexity” she brags she’s achieved. I’m a relative newcomer to this Tudor world, and I have hundreds of books in my office, hundreds more articles in my filing cabinets, and a computer desktop that’s so crowded with Tudor documents and pictures that I need the biggest iMac just to have the room to write my book.